Staff Training

Rationale:

“A school is only as good as its teachers. It is teachers who make the difference to children’s life chances…the quest to get more good and outstanding teachers in front of children is a key challenge for all school leaders.” (Perfect Teacher-Led CPD, 2014)

A Year 8 student commenting on a great teacher:

“He likes us, makes it fun, but still makes us work really hard and expects us to do well. He’s much cleverer than some of the other teachers, but still makes it easy to learn. He lets us know how we are doing”.

To develop our staff we need to continue to get:

Teachers excited about teaching.

Teachers talking about teaching.

Teachers planning and evaluating their teaching together.

Teachers observing and learning from each other.

Teachers sharing what works with each other.

We need to find what is working and do it more, to find the bright spots in our school, that is the great teachers described by the year 8 student, and share what they are doing. We also need to invite the bright spots in from other schools to share good practice.

“It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert” (Malcolm Gladwell). For teachers this would equate to 10 years teaching. Teachers tend to plateau after 2-3 years. (S. Allison). If most teachers stop getting better after 2-3 years, whereas they should be developing their skills over 10 years to reach expert level, then how do we address the professional development deficit? We need to give staff a range of CPD opportunities that will engage, enthuse and motivate them.

For Teaching and Learning, the aims of our school, currently, are as follows:

Aims:

To improve Teaching and learning by embedding TEEP further.

To ensure that all staff have access to a coach.

To give staff time to carry out individual action research which will help develop pedagogy and practice.